When the time comes for annual or continuing appointment [tenure] reviews, how are we to document and explain to our colleagues (both within our library and within our institution), exactly what we have accomplished?

Your Research/Scholarship Statement - PowerPoint Presenttaion

Your Research/Scholarship Statement

Demands for increased accountability, assessment, measures for effectiveness, and evidence-based research productivity are among the vast array of pressures that we, as administrators or faculty, are facing in the context of higher education in today's competitive global environment.

At the university-level where we, as library faculty, face scrutiny by colleagues unfamiliar with our discipline and our scholarship, it may not be easy to articulate the multi-faceted nature and value of librarians' scholarship. One solution is for us to articulate our research/scholarship in terms of Scholarship of Engagement (to build on Ernest Boyer's terminology - See page, Scholarship of Teaching, in this section's drop-down menu).

As recently noted by Craig Gibson and Christopher Dixon (George Mason University Libraries) some of the complex challenges that libraries and librarians must address are: "Issues of scholarly practices and scholarly communication; the rapid migration of content to digital environments and the attendant behavioral changes of students, faculty, and others; shifts in pedagogy toward enquiry, critical reflection, and evidence-base reasoning; issues of intellectual property and author rights; data mining and e-science; and assessment of learning and program outcomes ... ." (Gibson and Dixon, 2011: p. 341).

The field of opportunities for librarians in research libraries to engage in the Scholarship of Engagement is now, more than ever, fertile ground for evidence-based engagement and scholarship undertaken with "internal partners" (e.g., student associations, teaching/learning centers, academic researchers) and "external partners" (e.g., museums, school districts, health care providers).

Lewis, Suzanne and Lisa Cotter (2007). “Have the Most Relevant and Answerable Research Questions Facing Librarians Changed Between 2001 and 2006?” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2(1): 107-120, March 2007.